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Private and Public Mastodon

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Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#11

Post by m-p-3 »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon. The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is. And yet, here we are. I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except…

But on the other hand you have a popular platform, with a lot of people who can help, and with which some people are already used to, that you could deploy internally and use as some sort of internal messageboard that can be easily used from anywhere, with an official and third-party mobile apps already available.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#12

Post by nightpool »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon. The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is. And yet, here we are. I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except…

I think it's more like "What if you could have email, but your posts only go to the people you want them to?" I think that's pretty easy with Gmail, for the most part, but with Mastodon it's harder because it inverts that control—anyone can follow you (or send a follow request), and it's harder to police every follower individually. This is combined with the fact that most accounts are available anonymously on the web, but it's not really necessary (many are not, for instance, and even the ones that are aren't really convenient to access that way—for bad-faith actors, it's more convenient to sign up for an account on mastodon.social or some other "well known" server and then find posts that way by browsing timelines).

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#13

Post by foobarbecue »

invig wrote: post #7
foobarbecue wrote: post #3

This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the so…

You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private. You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it). The only way…

Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#14

Post by invig »

Groxx wrote: post #9
NikolaNovak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, ac…

FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into t…

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though?

Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading.

That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?).

I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#15

Post by tedunangst »

Wait until you hear about how followers only posts actually work. An analogy would be Microsoft can't figure out how to get email addressing to work in Outlook, so they send every email to every server, and then Exchange does some magic filtering and tells Outlook which of the emails in your inbox should be visible. Then somebody writes an alternative SMTP server that allows viewing of these hidden messages, and Microsoft sues them.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#16

Post by kfsnd »

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever

Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Eventually, we'll give this data to the Internet Archive or put it in a torrent or something. It includes a decent amount of now-deleted content too.

Really, it's no different to what others, e.g. Pushshift, are doing with other sites. Except there's no opt-out. Anything you've already said is almost certainly in our data set, and it's there permanently.

> That’s extremely hard to prevent but isn’t really the problem: The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets.

Also correct. A couple of KFers we know already have access to search the data we've collected. It points them towards interesting posts or accounts to archive. People say some pretty wild things when they think they're not being recorded for posterity!

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#17

Post by Groxx »

invig wrote: post #14
Groxx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into t…

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how soci…

Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1]

"Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly.

[1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on.

Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#18

Post by michaelmrose »

Child Porn is a huge image problem that can only be solved by governments in the relevant jurisdictions. Search makes this image problem drastically worse.

Lots of discussion about what privacy means no discussion about the elephant in the room. Networks that make acceptable use a choose your own adventure for instance by allowing people to self host and set policy on their own server end up with some people using it for things that the rest of planet earth doesn't find acceptable. For instance I'm certain that common web frameworks and servers are used to promote things both odious and illegal but because that machinery is invisible to most users the blame accrues entirely to the criminal.

With Mastodon the branding makes it possible for the blame to accrue to Mastodon as opposed merely the criminal because people are more apt to understand Mastodon as an open source twitter as opposed to a tool like Apache. Whereas this problem accrues to Mastodon the tool is in no position to dictate how users use the tool the relevant governments are and if prosecution becomes common hiding illegal porn from prying eyes will be done by the users themselves. If Mastodon suggests not federating with servers in countries that don't handle this issue eg Japan then search will tend to show off less negative content and indeed countries can be shamed into handling such issues better.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#19

Post by foobarbecue »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #5
foobarbecue wrote: post #3

This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the so…

Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, ac…

I agree, G+ system was more explicit, and I preferred it. FB has done the usual modern thing of hiding features so that the less technical users don't worry about them. Perhaps cowardly; I think even someone struggling with tech (parents, grandparents..) would have learned G+ if it really took off.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#20

Post by Ciantic »

Eugen Rochko, the developer of Mastodon had written about Search that if it comes it should be for the home timeline and own posts. It would help a little bit, at least you'd find old posts from people you follow.

It would suit some, but since this is federated, there are already instances with a search like qoto.org with a full-text search.

It's really odd that they made "no index" checkbox, but it's not cool to index. If they thought it is unpopular they should have made indexing opt-in not opt-out.

Going forward this will be instance specific thing, a lot of people want to be able to do searches.

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